The beginning of the second term is normally a period of big changes in a presidential administration and President Obama’s is no exception. He is going to get a new Treasury Secretary, Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. One notable member of the cabinet that does plan to stay on for at least the near future is Attorney General Eric Holder. This is significant for the marijuana reform movement.

Holder is the individual primarily responsible for dealing with the federal/state conflict regarding marijuana law. He not only provides legal advice to the President, but as the head of the Department of Justice he controls much of the federal law enforcement apparatus including the FBI and DEA. In addition, the Attorney General has the power to reschedule drugs, including marijuana, without Congressional involvement.

Having Holder remain in his current position is probably not great news for the reform movement. He has proven not to be a friend of the movement. In fact, under Holder multiple federal agencies have acted aggressively against state medical marijuana programs trying to undermine them on several fronts. The federal behavior towards medical marijuana has been much worse under Obama than any of the recent presidents.

While the Obama administration seems to be slightly altering its public stance towards marijuana reform following the recent passage of the legalization initiatives in Colorado and Washington, it is normally unusual to see significant course changes at large bureaucracies without a change of leadership.

There is a real possibility that we could see some minor improvements from the Obama administration on this issue, but Holder remaining as Attorney General I suspect makes seeing a big shift in federal policy towards state marijuana laws less likely.

The most telling part of this is: re-appointing someone to continue to head an agency doesn’t require confirmation hearings. So there’s that. Mustn’t have the Attorney General sullied by having to answer questions from the People’s representatives.

yeah, absolutely…sorry if that came off too strong in dismissing the underlings.

My two cents: For example, that was something that bothered me about the discussion surrounding the nomination of Justice Kagan. She made some principled remarks as Dean of Harvard Law School, then did a complete 180 when told to do so by the higher ups. She does bear some level of responsibility for her role in that (for example, she could have forced Summers to fire her), yet a lot of DC punditry seemed quite content to just dismiss those kinds of concerns out of hand.

But I think it’s important to keep the focus on those higher ups. People like Eric Holder and Tim Geithner are doing a good job; in fact, they are performing at a rather exemplary level at what they have been tasked to do. Changing them doesn’t change the problem, because the problem is the marching orders from the higher ups. Geithner will be stepping away from Treasury. To be replaced by a guy whose private sector experience is gambling at Citi and who has no intention of addressing the fraud and corruption destroying our financial system.

This is very similar to the platinum coin solution. That monetary options solves the problem of Republican legislators out to destroy the country by denying both taxation and debt issuance. But that’s not the problem – the actual problem is that the President agrees with them that the debt/deficit is a near term issue. Or if that’s a bad example, take universal healthcare. Hacker’s public option was a great academic compromise balancing a variety of interests. But that wasn’t the problem; the problem was that Democratic leaders weren’t interested in a health care bill that represented the will of the people.